Greedy Goblin

Friday, January 25, 2013

Catalysts, fittings, seedings

This post is probably only useful to Knights of the New Order, but maybe other market seeders (low-nullsec traders) can benefit from it too. For everyone else, let me post the question of a ganked miner:

(No, he wasn't taunting or crying, he honestly didn't know that you can lose your ship in highsec)

At first let's talk about ganking catalysts. They are simple to fit: magstabs to lows, blasters to highs. To mids you have to choose between one or two sensor boosters, afterburner or warp scrambler. Use small hybrid burst areator and small hybrid collision accelerator rigs. However there are several versions of each item. No sane man would fit faction or deadspace items on a suicide ganking ship, so we just focus on T1, T2 and meta items.

On the left of the table you an see the overheated DPS of the various guns with a perfectly skilled pilot using rigs and T2 magstabs. You are not a perfectly skilled pilot, but the ratios are the same for everyone. As a general rule, every meta level gives 5% DPS, T2 is much better than even meta 4 and and moving up in the electron - ion - neutron way gives another 6%. So as first idea, don't use electrons. Ever. Ions are different because of their much easier fitting. A T2 neutron catalyst has little CPU and powergrid left for medslot items. Also, ions are significantly cheaper than neutrons.

On the right side you can see the magnetic field stabilizers. Moving up the meta level you gain about 2.5% DPS, with Magnetic Vortex stabilizer being almost as good as T2, but with significantly worse fitting demands. I also seeded all 5.

Now let's look at the prices (K ISK). They are current average of sell and buy, but that's not surely the best data, see below:

Version

Small ion gun

Small neutron

Magstab

T1

29

60

80

Meta 1

15

110

90

Meta 2

45

220

130

Meta 3

155

500

265

Meta 4

350

1150

555

T2

1150

1300

1000

As usual you have to pay larger and larger amounts for small upgrades. However don't forget to compare the costs to the cost of the whole gank, including your opportunity cost. If the total cost of the gank is 15M then 1% DPS upgrade for 150K isn't a bad deal, even if the individual item is 100% more expensive than the previous version. The T2 gain is 46% over T1, so its price is well justified. 2 T2 Catas are equal to 3 T1. The metas are harder issue due to their lower gains. However the Meta 1 and Meta 2 are so cheap that you really shouldn't use T1.

Now let's look at the price changes of Anode light ion particle accelerator:

The rest of the guns are the same. This is a problem. The T1 and T2 items are manufactured by players and their price more or less linked to their material costs. However metas are NPC drops so the supply can't really increase. We use these things up pretty fast. I don't know where the price will stop. Maybe there is a serious hidden supply of them, metas being reprocessed. This case the higher prices will increase supply. If there is not, the prices can run up to the point where the demand stops. This can mean that sooner or later those who can't use T2 will have to use T1. Let's hope for the first option. The magstab prices are more stable since magstabs are used by every gallente and non-missile caldari pilots, not just by newbies like the small meta guns.

The meta and T2 ions, neutrons, magstabs, along with catalyst hulls, Experimental 1MN afterburners, prototype sensor boosters, rigs and Initiated harmonic warp scramblers are available in all 3 HQs. The expensive ones are about 10% above Jita sell price, the cheap ones have higher margin simply because their transportation and handling cost more than the item. The hulls have a higher margin too because they are large and takes lot of time to transport them. The price difference is needed to prevent hostile buyouts.

In the Tolle base I also set up buy orders for these items, so you can dump your excess or loot from destroyed ships. I simply don't have order slots left to set buy orders in the other two HQs.

"Maybe there is a serious hidden supply of them, metas being reprocessed. This case the higher prices will increase supply."

From back when I used to be a regular mission runner I remember that weapons were always nice to loot as they usually fetched a decent price relative to other loot and there was plenty of demand for them (the fact that most ships have 3+ identical guns probably helps there). I imagine there are people who reprocess them and their other loot purely because they find it easier to sell or use it as a few piles of minerals than as hundreds of small stacks of different mods, but I'm not sure if any amount of price change would convince them to stop - they're already reprocessing themselves out of ISK.

I suspect the price increase for the various meta guns isn't just due to demand from the New Order - the changes to NPC AI make bringing an on-field salvager into missions a bad idea, so a lot less mission runners are looting or salvaging their wrecks. Personally I can't see why having a Noctis one room or one mission behind the mission runner(s) is a problem, but I haven't been a big mission runner for over a year so maybe things have changed.

Dude you choose to ignore the real problems: most mining bots use hulks, armor implants and mine in 0.8 or higher. so no way you can kill them with Catalysts unless you fileld more than 10 of them at a time. Also the real problem here are the mission running bots using navy issue ravens. They make way more isk than minning bots and they CANNOT be killed.